August 26–September 2, 1999

movie shorts

The 13th Warrior

Rumor is that John McTiernan’s film, based on Michael Crichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead, has been on the shelf since 1997: we can only imagine what compelled Touchstone to release this Braveheart-wannabe at this moment. As punishment for lusting after a rich guy’s woman, Ibn (Antonio Banderas) is banished from his comfortable courtly poet’s berth in a 10th century Arab kingdom. Traveling in Central Asia, he hooks up with a group of Norse warriors who draft him for their Seven Samurai-like crusade against a raping, pillaging, bear-head-wearing, corpse-eating tribe of scary-ass goons. There is some laughable nonsense, for instance, once the outsider Ibn learns Norse, suddenly everyone’s speaking English (shades of McTiernen’s Hunt for Red October), or the good guys trying to decipher a witchy woman’s Yoda-speak prophecy. But the movie is mostly composed of slow motion shots of manly men drinking, brawling, swaggering and beheading, apparently the preferred mode of murder back in these olden days. Much blood. Much mud. Not enough camp.

—Cindy Fuchs